Abraham ibn Ezra’ abandoned the Iberian Peninsula in 1140, and brought the philological, scientific and literary achievements reached by his Hispanic coreligionists in the 10th and 11th centuries to the Jewish communities of Italy, France, and England. In Italy he wrote five notable philological writings, explaining his personal view on Hebrew grammar. These two works are the first and the last one that he wrote.

We had until now rather deficient editions of this book, published many years ago. The new Hebrew text of Safah berurah has been prepared taking into consideration all the existing manuscripts and previous editions, and collecting all the significant variant readings in the critical apparatus. The translation and notes are in Spanish, but the English reader has also a very adequate general explanation in English. This book has been the subject of a PhD dissertation, and has been completed, corrected and updated by Prof. A. Saenz-Badillos, responsible of quite a few critical editions of medieval Hebrew texts.

Grammatical works like Safahberurah allow one to penetrate the peculiar global universe of Abraham ibn ‘Ezra’, to acquire a perspective of the richness of Hebrew-Spanish Judaism in its most glaring and most flourishing time. We find in it not only the main lines of the author’s grammatical thought, but also important cues for understanding his biblical interpretation: his grammatical books were written as a help for exegesis: the corpus on which this grammar is based is the Bible, whose darkness it seeks to illuminate, and linguistic norms are, ultimately, hermeneutic rules.